


All That I'm Good For

by witling



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Banter, Drunkenness, Emotions, Hurt/Comfort, Incest, M/M, Morphine, Taking Showers Is a Good Way to Avoid Talking, motel sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-08
Updated: 2013-09-08
Packaged: 2017-12-26 01:13:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/959841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/witling/pseuds/witling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The whole thing was fucked up to start with. You can't grow up with someone and half-raise or be half-raised by them, have one dead parent and one insane and hell-bent on training you up to be a wolfhound—you can't be that person, live alongside that person, and not be fucked up. You can't. It isn't possible.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All That I'm Good For

The whole thing was fucked up to start with. You can't grow up with someone and half-raise or be half-raised by them, have one dead parent and one insane and hell-bent on training you up to be a wolfhound—you can't be that person, live alongside that person, and not be fucked up. You can't. It isn't possible. It is the definition, the very model, of fucked-up.

That's what Sam tells himself, lying on the cheap thin mattress under the rough sheet, staring up at the dangling fire alarm and listening to the shower, which has been running since before he woke up, half an hour ago.

 

 

It was jealousy, basically. A revenge spirit, kicked into high gear by a bad marriage, then—after the new groom was decapitated, eviscerated, defenestrated—tornadoing off into the surrounding families. All of them with the same long faces, the same pale eyes and lemon-colored hair. All living in the same little hamlet in upstate New York, in the aftermath of the industrial economy. Five people dead, before they crisped the thing.

Five people dead and Sam pinned down in the grinding gears of the cement factory, kicking and screaming. No, really, kicking like a donkey and screaming like a motherfucking train going off its tracks. It broke three ribs, tore holes in his skin, and he was sure he was going to die. He doesn't remember more than that—no Faulknerian moment of light through the high dusty window or any of that shit. He was preoccupied. He doesn't remember Dean saving him, he isn't clear on the details of how that was achieved.

He just remembers waking up later in the back seat of the Impala, aching and fuzzy, pumped full of morphine, and swinging his gaze around like a drunken telescope until it landed on the back of Dean's head. Dean's hair, brush cut in the back, so short his scalp showed. Sam remembers thinking drunken, disjointed thoughts. Dean's hair is butch. It was funny at the time. I guess he saved me. We're driving so fast. I love morphine...

Everything was funny at the time. He laughed and laughed, until Dean turned around, white-faced and taut, and told him to shut the fuck up, he was bleeding through his bandages.

 

 

He got X-rayed and stitched up in a walk-in clinic two towns over, by a doubtful-looking intern who wanted to keep him but couldn't. He was still high, still flying, no one could keep him. He walked out under his own steam, with Dean's hand under his arm. Not supporting him, just keeping him on track.

 

 

Lying in bed, he tries to remember how many times he's had stitches. How many bones he's broken. It's too much, stupid even to try, like trying to remember every birthday present you've ever gotten. So he starts counting scars instead. At least with the scars there's something physical to remind him—oh yeah, wendigo. Vampire. Werewolf.

His life isn't normal, he tells himself, listening to the water run. There's no way it could be. He's warped. Shouldn't warped people get to be happy too?

 

 

“Here's to putting up a fight,” Dean said, pulling a bottle of bourbon from the paper sack. “Even if you get your ass handed to you.”

“Hear hear.” Sam, sitting up against the wall behind his bed, clicked over to the Knicks game and watched Dean look around the room for cups. There were none; it was that kind of motel.

“On a plate,” Dean said. “With parsley.”

“Fuck you.”

“Not your fault, Sammy. I shouldn't have sent a boy to do a man's job.”

“Seriously. Fuck you.”

Dean grinned, unscrewed the lid of the bottle, and took a swig. “Oh—Jesus.” He coughed. “Phew.” Sam held out his hand, and Dean gave him the bottle, then sat down on his own bed and started sharpening a knife. “How you feeling?”

The bourbon hit his throat like an airlock blowing. Sam felt the top of his head lift several inches, hover in midair, then resettle on his skull. He gasped.

“What the fuck?” he asked, when he could talk. Dean shrugged, and Sam handed the bottle back.

They watched the game for a minute or two. Sam scratched his stitches, then noticed Dean noticing, and stopped.

“I'm good,” he said. “Ready to move.”

“Good. I think I got us a gig in Memphis.”

“Memphis.” Sam blinked a little water from his eye. “That's, what, a couple days drive?”

“Give you time to get back in fighting form. And I could use a little Southern comfort right about now.”

“Meaning...” Sam handed the bottle back, and Dean took it with a studious look.

“It's fucking cold,” he said, and drank.

It was, and the heat didn't work right. Sam nodded.

“And I also,” Dean said hoarsely, after another shot from the bottle, “would not mind getting the hell out of Creepsville, USA. Seriously, dude, they're starting to know me in the drugstore.” He held up the blade and turned it to the light. “Are they all related to each other?”

“Pretty much.”

“Freaking Melungeons.”

Sam laughed, and held out his hand for the bottle, and it went like that for a while. Just drinking and shooting the shit, the corners of things getting softer and easier.

“Whoah,” said Dean, when Sam put the bottle down on the edge of the night table and it almost toppled off. “Slow down there, lady.”

Sam ground the heels of his hands into his eyes until he saw stars, and thought about watching morning cartoons with Dean when they were kids, Thundercats and Power Rangers, the volume turned down low when Dad was asleep in one of the motel beds.

“What's it like,” he said, “you think, to grow up in a town where you're related to everyone else?”

When he opened his eyes, Dean seemed to be considering the question seriously. “Freaky,” he said at last. “Everyone's got those--” He pointed with two fingers at the bridge of his nose. “Eyes. Too close together.” He shuddered, and reached for the bottle.

“Yeah, but. If you grow up here, that's just normal. Maybe you don't even see it.”

“I'd see it.”

“Not if you were used to it.”

“I'd see it.” Dean drank, and shuddered again. “Every time I looked in the fucking mirror, I'd see it.”

 

 

After Dean drove them back to the motel, after he dragged Sam out of the car and into the room and piled him into bed like a heap of laundry—after all that, it started to hurt. The morphine wore off and Sam lay awake in the cold room, his eyes closed. He pretended to be asleep or too out of it to notice when Dean unlaced his boots and took them off, eased the blankets around him. He lay still and let Dean crouch beside the bed, pull up his shirt, and lightly touch the bandages. His fingers were careful, exploratory, cool. For a long while there was silence.

Dean whispered, “Jesus Christ, Sammy.” He pulled Sam's shirt back down, tucked the blanket around him, and sat down on the other bed with a creak.

Sam waited for something else to happen, but nothing did. Somehow, he fell through the ache and cold and into sleep.

 

 

They fooled around a few times when they were kids. Everyone does that. Kids are freaks, they'll do anything. They don't know any better. Even now, in his memory, there's no real shame in the thought of it. It feels familiar, and intensely personal, but not like they did anything wrong. Sometimes he wonders if Dean remembers it, or ever thinks about it, or feels the way he does about it. Like it's one of the good things, the things that bind them together without hurting.

It's called a blow job, Dean told him. But she doesn't blow on you. These and other mysteries, interpreted from stolen skin mags like the secrets of some holy book. When you kiss a girl you have to think about eating something really good, like steak. Otherwise your mouth gets dry. It was like homework, or extra-credit, the pair of them sprawled on Dean's bed with a bag of Fritos and a couple of sodas from the vending machine outside the room. Dad nowhere in sight.

There was that, and then there was the real stuff, the stuff they didn't need to study or explain. It just came naturally, after a while. At night, in Dean's bed, their limbs caught up together and their breath climbing the same steep slope. Dean's hands as familiar as his own. Figuring things out. And then, after a certain point, it tapered off and...stopped. They got sucked up into the real world, the adult world. The world where you don't sleep in the same bed as your brother, where you don't wake up from a nightmare and turn toward him, feel his sleep-hot hands on your face and belly. Where you do not, in the early hours before dawn, feel his dick against your leg and fumble sleepily with the waist of his boxers to slip your hand inside.

Everything Sam learned about sex for the first twelve years of his life, he learned from Dean. Everything he learned about everything, he sometimes thinks.

 

 

“I dunno,” Sam said, feeling himself slide farther down the wall and into the pillow. “I just thought...this is it, you know?” He waved a hand vaguely. “It just really seemed like, time to check out.”

There was a small silence, and then Dean said, “That's stupid.”

“I know. I mean, how many vengeance spirits have I--” He raised a hand and started silently twitching the fingers, counting. “I don't even know. But something about this one, man. I don't know what it was.”

“Yeah, well.” Dean took another hit off the bottle. The level was low, almost three-quarters gone. “You get pinned down in a cement factory, you think it's sayonara time. I hear you. But no fucking way that was going to happen, Sammy. You gotta know that.”

Sam turned his head and squinted. Dean's face was earnest, dead-set. “I gotta know what?”

“I'm not gonna let some stupid vengeance spirit gank you. Jesus Christ, Sam. You think I'd let that happen?”

“I think...” Sam studied Dean's face, trying and failing, as always, to understand the spine of certainty in him. “I think if you'd been a little slower, you'd be telling this to my headstone.”

Dean blew out a derisive breath and drank again.

“It's like you think,” Sam said, “that you get to decide when I'm gonna die. News flash, Dean: Dad died. Mom died. It's not up to you.”

“Shut up.”

Sam lifted the bottom of his shirt and ran his hand under to scratch at his stitches. They itched like hell, especially in the cold. “Whatever. I'm alive, I lived. Thank you very much.”

“Yeah, you're welcome.”

“I just--”

Dean said nothing, and after a minute or so Sam shrugged. “I don't know.”

“If you die,” Dean said, getting up and heading for the bathroom, “you better know I'm not kicking around here on my own for sixty years while the world goes Thunderdome. I'll be right there after you.” He disappeared through the door, kicking it it halfway closed behind him. There was the clank of the toilet lid going up.

Sam sat staring at the door. After a few seconds, he heard Dean start to piss.

“You're kidding me,” he called, and then he had to get up, heave himself painfully out of the bed and find his balance—he was drunker than he'd thought—and go lean in the bathroom door. “Did you just...do we have a suicide pact, now?”

Dean glanced over his shoulder. “Little privacy?”

“Oh, so you can kill yourself for me but I can't watch you pee?”

“You can, but you gotta buy me dinner after.”

“Dean, do you have even half a clue—do you even know how nuts you are?”

Dean finished peeing, shook off with an elaborate knee bend, and zipped up. Then he kicked the lid down and went to the sink to wash his hands. In the mirror, he gave Sam a sober look.

“You tell me,” he said, “what's nuts about it. My whole family dies, and I'm stuck gumming my Geritol and greasing my walker for Bingo night at the club. Yeah, that sounds nice.”

“Okay,” Sam said. “First of all, I'm not dead. And second, what you're describing is a normal life.”

“We're not normal.”

Sam laughed, without much humor. “No shit.”

Dean dried his hands on the tiny bath towel and tossed it over the rail. His eyes, Sam noticed, were veined with red. They were both drunk. “What you need to understand is, you're my brother. You're what I live for, Sammy. If you ever leave me—I mean, really leave me, like check out for good? I'm not sticking around to find out what that feels like. I'm gone.”

“That is so fucked up,” said Sam.

“Like you wouldn't do the same thing.”

“Fuck no, I wouldn't.” The whole thing pissed him off—the idea of Dean stepping off an office tower with a lock of Sam's hair in his pocket, the assumption that Sam would do the same. It was stupid, tribal, insane. And yet, somewhere deep in the back of his mind was a little voice saying something he didn't want to hear. You would. You might not eat a shotgun, but you'd be as good as dead until you found a way to die. “That's some soap opera bullshit, Dean.”

“Maybe.” Dean stepped forward, clapped his hand onto Sam's shoulder, and gave him a little shake. “As long as I'm not Susan Lucci, I could give a flying fuck.”

They stared at each other, and Sam knew what was supposed to happen next—another jab, or let it roll off, whatever, but he needed to step out of the doorway. They were inches apart, so close he could smell Dean's skin, his breath and hair. He could see the fine lines just starting at the corners of Dean's eyes.

“I just--” he said, and then he felt the whole thing tipping over, realized it had already been tipping for some time and now it was happening fast and sudden, like a boat taking on water and plunging beneath the surface. He felt his face flash hot, his heart stutter. And in Dean's face, the shift. Recognition, uncertainty. There was an instant when he could have stopped it from happening. Either of them could have.

Sam leaned forward, closed the space between them almost carefully, and brushed his lips against Dean's cheek. He stayed there, breathing hard through a dry mouth. His heart hammering in his ears. Dean didn't move. Sam put his lips to Dean's jaw. He breathed in. He could feel Dean's pulse throbbing in the soft skin of his throat.

Dean made a small sound, a tentative sound of protest, and Sam closed his eyes.

“I don't want to die,” he said, through gritted teeth. “And I don't want you to, either.” He felt Dean inhale to reply, and brought up his hand to place it on Dean's chest. The soft cotton of his shirt, the firm muscle beneath. “Just--” He couldn't think what to say after that. He drew his head back and, without looking at Dean, kissed him on the mouth.

For a moment it was dry, hot, unresponsive. Think of steak, Sam thought, and it was so stupid, so messed up, that he almost laughed.

Then Dean made the same small sound of protest, and pushed his mouth harder into Sam's. He tasted familiar, and the stubble around his lips burned Sam's skin. His hand took hold of Sam's hip in a death grip.

They danced like that on the threshold, locked up and gasping, breathing booze into each other's mouths.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Dean muttered, wrenching his head away, dropping it to rest on Sam's chest. He beat his forehead there a few times. “No, no, no fucking way. No way, Sammy.” His hand stayed locked on Sam's hip.

“It's okay,” Sam heard himself saying. “It's okay, it's okay.” He held on, letting Dean batter his head and grind his teeth and curse, letting him work through some of it. Sam felt insanely high, elated, like he'd slipped the surly bonds of something, he didn't know what. He raised his hand and ran his fingers fondly through Dean's hair, against the soft short prickle. “It's okay, come on. It's okay.”

“It's not fucking okay,” Dean said. “It's really not fucking okay, Sammy.”

“I know. Come on, hey.”

“It's not okay to do this, Sam. This isn't--” Dean raised his head, and Sam saw there were tears standing in his eyes. Dean, always the tough one, always the crier. “This is seriously not okay, you know that?”

“Yeah, I know that. But--” He wasn't sure how to say it, how to explain the leap he'd just made, without even planning to. “But it kind of is. For us. I mean, come on.” He had the strongest urge to touch Dean's face, just run a finger down his cheek. And what was wrong with that, exactly?

“Come on,” Dean repeated. “Come on how, exactly? You're my brother. How the hell is that supposed to work?”

Sam had no answer for that. He had no idea how any of it was supposed to work—kissing Dean, or surviving a hunt, or growing up like a wolfhound in a civilized world. He leaned forward and kissed Dean again, and Dean fisted his hands in Sam's shirt and kissed back. It was fucked up, it was all kinds of fucked up, but he was flying, he was happy, he had his brother in his arms and the rest of the world could go screw itself. He was alive.

 

 

 

The shower shuts off, and Sam feels a skip of fear in his belly. He's had time to think and rethink, to remember moments that seem like incredibly vivid, electric dreams, to wonder if he's lost his mind. He kissed Dean. He...took Dean to bed. The phrasing is ridiculous, Victorian, but it's what pops into his head. Because what they did wasn't sex exactly, or yes, of course it was, it just wasn't what he always assumed men did together. It was more like what they did when they were kids, fumbling and inexpert, desperate, insane, absolute. Not like anything he's ever done with anyone else.

And that's incest for you, he tells himself, sitting up straighter against the wall.

In a minute Dean's going to have to come out of the bathroom, and if Sam is any judge of his brother, there will be no mention of the night before. No mention of the fact that they shared a bed, or of any of the things they said or did.

I fucking love you, Dean said, staring up at Sam, his eyes glassy and rapt. I fucking love you so much, Sammy.

There'll be no mention of the half-hour-long shower, or of the nearly totaled bottle on the night stand. Or of the fact that Dean slid out of the bed while he thought Sam was asleep, that he sat on the edge of the mattress with his head in his hands, unmoving, for almost five minutes before he got up and walked slowly to the bathroom, his shirt in his hand.

I want-- Dean said. Oh God, please, just-- He wouldn't, or couldn't, say more than that. But when Sam came, Dean turned him over gently and lay over him, kissing him like he'd done something miraculous.

In a minute or two Dean's going to come out of the bathroom washed and shaved and fully dressed, and his face will be blank, and if he says anything at all it'll be to tell Sam to hurry up and meet him in the restaurant for breakfast. If Sam is any judge of his brother at all, that's how this is going to go.

Except that last night there was a little sliver of time, impossible to say how much, when Dean lost the frantic shine in his eyes and just looked happy. He kissed Sam and rubbed a hand through his hair, and for a little while it was just like when they were kids. His smile was easy, and the lines around his eyes seemed to have disappeared.

It's gonna be okay, Sam said, and Dean said, I know.

**Author's Note:**

> Hem, “All that I'm good for”
> 
> leave my station where i stood  
> to lay for a while with you  
> i got shadows snapping at my tail  
> who say i'm no damn good  
> but that's just halfway true  
> all that i'm good for is you
> 
> you know i play with all those strays  
> prowling outside your door  
> it's the scraps of love you throw my way  
> that have got me on all fours  
> it's only fair you knew  
> all that i'm good for is you
> 
> but i'll leave it behind  
> to lay down with you  
> i'll stop running wild  
> and doing what i used to do
> 
> my whole wide world is out of hand  
> so crooked it leaves me cryin'  
> but your love is straight is narrow and  
> it's keeping me in line  
> this love will see me through  
> all that i'm good for is you
> 
> all i'll leave it behind  
> to lay down with you  
> i'll stop running wild  
> and doing what i used to do  
> all that i'm good for is you


End file.
